Inbox: - https://aeon.co/essays/dolphin-intelligence-and-humanitys-cosmic-future ## 80,000 Hours interview https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tom-moynihan-prior-generations/ When doing history of ideas you are often looking for things that I'm not just unthought but unthinkable. Religious: justice is what is. Secular: what is is just. Positive thinking: what is Normative thinking: what should be Conceptual inertia Obstructive ideas --- Tom Moynihan: Also, just through talking to people, pointing out the tension that we spoke about earlier, how I stress this idea of humanity bravely defining values against this indifferent universe. And then you fall into that Epicurean thing of, well, if they’re the only thing defining value, does it matter if they disappear? You have to have that more impartial view. And also, you want to stress the significance of non-sapient, sentient life as well. That’s something that I’ve updated on, having spoken to people after the book came out. Rob Wiblin: Is there any simple way of summing up how it is that you went from embracing a more critical post-modernist perspective to believing, to some degree, in the positive march of history? Tom Moynihan: It was from actually reading Enlightenment texts for the first time. So this is a long time ago. For undergraduates, you’re taught to do, or I was taught to do, it’s the Foucault, Derrida, that kind of outlook. Deconstruction was very popular back then. I don’t think it is as much anymore, but it was. And then, the things you’re deconstructing, you’re meant to go out and rebelliously go and deconstruct the great Enlightenment texts. That’s where the low-hanging fruit or the soft underbelly of humanity is, to go and deconstruct. Tom Moynihan: And I obviously had to read those texts. And I was just very convinced, initially, by Kant. It was Kant that really, I was like, okay, this guy is actually far more coherent than Foucault, for example. It was also reading analytical philosophy, as opposed to continental philosophy, very early on. So again, I’m talking about 10 years ago. Again, this shows how young and early in my career I am, that that seems long ago to me. But, yeah, actually engaging with analytical philosophy and thinking, this is rigorous and the rigor allows you to do more things. So it’s in a sense of constraints. Tom Moynihan: There’s, I think, funnily enough, quite a libertarian idea of freedom in continental tradition, **that it’s just rejecting authority, norms, constraints, because they’re all arbitrary**. And that’s how you get freedom. I think I arrived at this more positive sense of freedom, that **the constraints of rigor, actually those are enabling constraints and they actually allow you just to think more.** And I mean that in terms of scope, not just in terms of sitting down and spending more time thinking. But, yeah, I think it just **widens the scope of what you can think,** and I found that incredibly interesting. So I think that was the conversion moment, so to speak. --- Tom Moynihan: Yeah. So at the moment I’m working on creating a flow chart of crisp historical insights that have gone into the discovery of existential risk. The aim of this is to provide a high-level condensed picture of these insights for EAs and other people working on existential risk. I think it’d be useful to have that kind of decomposed dissected view of the idea and what went into discovering it. I’m also laying the ground plans for my next large book project, which I’m giving the working title of The Genesis of the High-Stakes Worldview. This is a work on longtermism and I’m attempting to answer the big question of why longtermism now, why not earlier in world history? So why were there not longtermists in the 1500s. --- So I think there’s definitely some Eurocentrism that probably goes into it and I’m going to try and correct that going forward. Other things, I think I mentioned this earlier, the axiology, the kind of wide, high-level axiology, **I did stress or seem to stress this idea of humanity bestowing value on the world or creating human-made value. I think I stressed that too much.** Since writing the book, I’ve become a lot more, well, **I’ve read some more Henry Sidgwick** and I’ve become a lot more interested in that way of looking at things. Rob Wiblin: Okay. Let’s just back up and explain this one for the audience. It’s a tension that I noticed in the book, and I think some other people did as well, that sometimes you describe value as this kind of objective, natural thing that could exist apart from humans or any other intelligent species apprehending that that value exists. And then there’s other times where you talk about it as though if there were no humans or intelligent beings around to value something and to see that there was value there, then the universe would be without value. Am I understanding right the kind of tension between two different philosophical stances that have come through in the book? Tom Moynihan: Yeah and I think I have since realized that that’s a tension, and **I think that comes from a view of the Enlightenment more based in the Germanic tradition than in the Anglophone utilitarian one, which stresses the Enlightenment as, well in Kant’s definition, it’s the emergence of humanity from self-imposed knowledge. To translate that it just means kind of submitting all our claims to the authority of reason rather than any arbitrary seat of power. **Tom Moynihan: So those arbitrary seats of power might be nature’s precedent, or the precedent of tradition, or might is right. This idea that in a sense we define what is right for ourselves is the basis of the enlightenment of modernity itself. This idea that we can legitimate our own moral claims rather than just inherit them from nature or tradition.** And I think this comes from taking this historical outlook because shaking off the yoke of tradition and arbitrary power can look a lot, in the historical process, and it did to these individuals, as if humanity was in a sense defining and making its own values, bestowing them on the world. Tom Moynihan: And I think this is what channels people like Kant into this kind of era where they think that humans are the only thing that matters. The only reason why we shouldn’t harm animals in Kant’s argument is because it might degrade humans. Which is kind of a ridiculous view, but taking that historical look, it looks like humanity is making value rather than finding it. Tom Moynihan: **I have now become far more invested in that more impartial Sidgwickian kind of view after having engaged with it more deeply. And I think it’s the far more coherent view. So I think that moral agents discover what is valuable in the sense that the first humans didn’t know what was impartially valuable. So we’ve had to kind of discover it through using reason and evidence and correcting errors about value. So that can look like a making, but I think ultimately it’s a finding, because it seems to be converging and arriving upon this very impartial sense.** Tom Moynihan: So again, I go back to the distinction I made earlier, and this is one that from **talking to Toby Ord, he stressed how important this distinction between moral patients and moral agents is.** So I think ultimately that if there were no humans, there’d still be value in the world if there are moral patients like animals, sentient beings, but **it would just kind of be lurching around randomly and aimlessly without this upward force towards making the world more valuable or containing more value.** And I think it was just not really being aware of that distinction and how it would create a lot of nice equilibrium between a lot of my other commitments that led me to this strange tension. Tom Moynihan: So yeah, I think that nature happens to create value, but only does so haphazardly and blindly. Rob Wiblin: Whereas humans can do it deliberately. Tom Moynihan: Exactly. **So once you have a species or a being that can apply right reason rather than arbitrary precedent or instinct, whatever, to isolate sources of value and then try and maximize them, you have in the same sense that life tends to create more life for the first time, you have this moral agency that can then tend to create more value.** So yeah, I think that ties it all together in a more coherent way than I did at all in the book where there were lots of commitments in tension. #todk ask Tom for the sig reference? (Check SEP first) --- It seems like people who’ve worked in history, who’ve worked in intellectual history, tend to go in different directions where they think about what did we learn from all this? There’s one stream of thought which is kind of deconstructionist, post-modernist, very skeptical and cynical about things, which says look at how mistaken people have been all through history and how they all disagreed about all of these different things, and it seems like none of them was really tethered to any reality. So given that, shouldn’t we assume basically the same thing of us, that it’s just a series of different conflicting narratives and who knows what’s true? Like maybe nobody is right. Rob Wiblin: I guess a different take might be, if we look at the track record, it seems like we’re getting better, that however wrong we are about things today, it seems like we were much more wrong in the past. And actually maybe we should resuscitate the idea of the forward march of history a little bit. Yeah. Where do you come down on this one? ... Rob Wiblin: I kind of want to respond by saying well, we have planes now and we can go to Mars. So I feel within at least some domains of inquiry, there’s just really strong, concrete evidence that we can do things that they would be very impressed by and would regard as progress by any measure of engineering and science and technology. Now it is possible that we’ve made lots of progress in engineering and some areas of science and technology, and perhaps in philosophy or ethics or social sciences where it’s a lot harder to test whether you’re right or not, maybe we’ve made little progress or no progress. That’s possible, but I would guess that these kinds of progress go together, because there’s common reasons why they would all be expected to advance simultaneously, like you have more education, people are healthier, they have more time to think about these things. So that’s a different outside view perspective that makes me somewhat more optimistic that we’re not just kidding ourselves when we think that we do know more, we have some better ideas than we used to. Tom Moynihan: Yeah. I think that you can always point to the fact that people 1,000 years ago didn’t know about subatomic processes or stellar nucleosynthesis, or even talking about Hubble earlier about the fact that there are extra galactic galaxies. These are things that we know now rather than earlier. Rob Wiblin: I guess another thing that’s really assuring about those kinds of examples is that it seems like if we could transport someone from the past to the present and show them the information that we have now, that they would be persuaded that we’re right and they’re wrong. People in the past didn’t have microscopes, so they didn’t know about bacteria and viruses, but now we have them. We could show them to them if we could transport them through time, and I think that would be persuasive to most. Likewise with telescopes. We shouldn’t expect that people are going to know the nature of the cosmos when they can’t see it the way that we can now. Tom Moynihan: I definitely agree. In terms of ways that we might be going wrong now, my sense, talking about microscopes, is that one of the principles of science that has proved most obstructive is… So earlier we talked about uniformitarianism stemming from parsimony. I think another one is Copernicanism, which has caused us to go as wrong as it’s caused us to go right. --- So, of course, creating pyramids, obelisks, sphinxes is, in a sense, you want to affect the future. You want to create a long-term propagating effect on it, but it’s very different, at least in my view. And again, like I said earlier, I want to go and shore this up and make sure that it’s actually based on a lot more evidence. Tom Moynihan: But when you look at these attitudes in elder times, it’s the dead hand of the past on the future. It’s a sense of lording it over the future, of just showing how influential you were. Or another way of putting that, and this is, I was reading about ideas of generational, intergenerational justice in the Christian tradition and also in ancient Greek and Plato, et cetera. It’s often, I would say, a very partial idea in the sense of the opposite of impartial — you care about future generations because they’re you, in some sense, because they’re just different versions of you, in the sense that the selfish idea of reproduction or creating progeny is you’re just creating more of yourself, right? Tom Moynihan: So, these elder traditions, when they’re talking about future generations, they’re talking about future generations of the same clan, of the same kin. What’s novel in modern thinking about future generations, and I would say, again, in my cursory beginning research on this topic, it really does begin with people like Sidgwick and also the economist who is very influenced by him, Francis Edgeworth, and this is in the latter 1800s… You actually begin to get this impartial sense of the value of future generations, where it’s not the dead hand of the past on the future, and neither is it you care about the future because it’s you, or it’s a propagated version of you. You care about it impartially, regardless of what they look like, who they are, how different they might be from you. Tom Moynihan: There’s actually a quote from Edgeworth that I wanted to read if that’s alright. Rob Wiblin: Go for it. Tom Moynihan: So this is, yeah, I think this is around the 1870s, and you get this shift in thinking about future generations, I think, around this time. So Edgeworth says, “But can we be certain that this method of total selection, of resource allocation, holds good when we provide not only for the next generation, but for the indefinite future? In the continuous series of generations, wave propagating wave, onward through all time, it is required to determine what wavelet, each section of each wave, shall contribute to the proximate propagated wave, so that the whole sum of light of joy, which glows in the long line of waves shall be the greatest possible.” Rob Wiblin: You’re going to have to translate that for me. Tom Moynihan: He’s just saying that we can think of the human lineage in this expanded sense where, again, it’s impartial and we can think about it as this long trajectory, this long wave. You can zoom in and we see that we’re each, in the same way that you zoom in on a wave and you can find smaller waves within it, we’re each these smaller waves. And we have to decide how much we want to sacrifice for the future to create the maximum sum of joy possible across that whole vast wave. Tom Moynihan: Now, that’s just very different from Plato or early Christian philosophers talking about how the Bible or the ideal state demands that we care about future generations that are, in a sense, just going to be the same as us. So yeah, I think that’s an incredibly important and novel, modern insight. And yeah, to go back to what we were saying about pharaohs versus us, the current generation, people only started talking in that sense sometime in the 1870s. It builds, it builds, it builds. And I think only now, people are just spending their entire lives thinking about the ethics of these things. That’s the way that Parfit puts it. Tom Moynihan: So, yeah, in a sense, we live in a hinge of history, as I was saying earlier, but potentially the first, in the sense of not just in a fork event — because obviously those have happened before, places where stuff could have gone very badly, irreversibly wrong — but we’re at a point where we have the minimal amounts of insight about how the world hangs together and our ideas and goals within it, wherein we can actually make an informed, intentional decision. I think that you could make that argument. Again, I’m not putting full confidence in it at all, but I think that that’s an argument that could be made. And it’s an insight that you only get from looking at the history of ideas. --- The biologist J.B.S. Haldane was once asked what would knock his confidence in the theory of evolution, and he answered “a Precambrian rabbit.” I would answer the same question about the very basic rudimental shape of what I’ve tried to tell when it comes to the Western tradition. The equivalent would be if someone could point me to someone writing in 300 BC that had anything as insightful or detailed to say about the future of humanity as, say, Toby Ord. That’s the Precambrian rabbit. I know that’s setting the goalposts very wide, but I do think that even though the record is very incomplete and my reading of it is very incomplete you still can see the basic structure, particularly when it comes to important ideas. --- I mean, one thing is that it took me a long time to actually fully come around to all of the principles of EA and longtermism, more so EA. I think it was actually this more recent phase where longtermism has come to the fore. That’s what just gelled with me more naturally, but it took me a long time. **Tom Moynihan:** So like I said, very early on, and I don’t want to talk about an intellectual trajectory or career, because I’m still incredibly young, and it sounds pompous and pretentious. But at the very beginning, I had this post-modern, anti-enlightenment, anti-humanist outlook. I quickly got rid of that and then had this Kantian outlook and was interested in human extinction because of deontological reasons. And yeah, it’s only more recently that I’ve really realized that there’s stronger arguments against it. And also just thinking about it more clearly, and, ironically, more consequentially, comes from taking a more consequentialist attitude. And it’s the idea of impartial value, the perspective of the universe, those are the kickers, I think. **Tom Moynihan:** So I think that, in a sense, doesn’t provide much protection, but might provide a tiny bit, is that I wasn’t always a convert. I was working on these questions for different reasons originally and came around to it through— **Rob Wiblin:** …you were convinced. **Tom Moynihan:** —a delayed process. Yeah. I think it was a process of convincing. **Rob Wiblin:** So I suppose maybe that gives you partial protection right now, because you’ve really come around to it recently, a lot of your ideas you were having before you were maybe socially committed to any particular view. --- Whereas, in extinction, in the modern idea of extinction, if we’re believing that in some meaningful sense, there aren’t any other intelligent agents in our cosmic vicinity, it’s this sense of this irreversible terminal frustration of what we think of as the moral order. **Tom Moynihan:** So be that the impartial demand to make the world a better place, not just from moral agents, but also from moral patients: animals, other sentiences… It’s the frustration of that upward force, that escalator to betterness, which you just don’t find in the apocalypse. And there are a couple of other things I mentioned earlier: the idea of the physical world continuing without that agency around. In apocalypses, it’s the afterlife. Everything just switches into this land beyond. So even though there are some exceptions, like I mentioned earlier, these other traditions outside of the Christian one that have some of these factors in them, they don’t have all of them. And so the way I sum it up is apocalypse secures a sense of an ending, whereas extinction anticipates the ending of sense. **Tom Moynihan:** So it’s a very different outlook. Whereas in the apocalypse, nothing’s at stake. Potentially in the possibility of extinction, in a sense, everything is at stake. I’ve changed the way I talk about this in the book. I think I imbued too much unique significance on humanity. But again, everything is at stake in that sense of there being a kind of direction and that morally meaningful universe. --- Rob Wiblin: Yeah. Actually another one, you had a talk about earlier, is optimization. Some fields like economics and engineering, perhaps applied engineering, are seeped in this idea of optimization and constrained optimization. But then there’s other fields where it seems to be largely absent, and isn’t part of the culture. Astonishingly, it seems like to some extent, this was true in moral philosophy, that the idea of maximizing moral value is not a fundamental thing within the field of moral philosophy. Obviously some people think about it, but it’s somewhat surprising that people haven’t gotten more mileage out of that. Tom Moynihan: Yeah, and this is something that I’m going to be looking at for my next project hopefully, is the history of this type of thinking, where it came from. But just in terms of anecdotally, I still come across that, that’s one of the major pushbacks when I talk about this with people outside of the communities that I know will be responsive to it, is, why care about maximizing value? Why would you care about having a universe with more value in it? Just be happy with what’s here already. So yeah, it’ll be interesting doing the lineage of that type of thinking to see where the inertial force behind that intuition still derives from.